Review: “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman

This book gives a deep insight into how we as human beings think. It talks about the two systems that have developed, what kind of problems they solve and how errors in judgement occur.

System 1 is the quick reactive, associative system in the brain. It is quick to try and solve a problem, even if it has to tamper with the question before it attempts to answer it. For example if you were asked:

“How much money would you be willing to give to protect wildlife?”

That question is extremely broad, system 1 will try and break this question down or associate it to another question and answer that. If for example you care about foxes or dolphins your brain might translate the question to:

“How much money would you be willing to give to protect dolphins?”

The two answers may have very different monetary amounts. System 1 is extremely quick at making associations, receiving a hard question to answer and transforming it into a simpler one. It is also possible to ‘prime’ system 1 to influence responses, by activating pleasant or unpleasant thoughts you can impact the results of a question. This makes system 1 quite unreliable. Another example where System 1 is engaged is the question “What does 2+2 equal?”, your brain knows this knowledge. It instantly retrieves the answer that is associated with the maths problem.

System 2 is reserved for harder problems. It is inherently lazy and is quite often happy to just “go with” system 1’s associative answer. System 2 is engaged when deep thought is required, for example the question “What is the result of 24 x 17?. you can tell someone has engaged system 2 because their eyes dilate and they generally stop all other activity whilst processing the answer.

Interestingly glucose levels in the blood stream  affect the performance of system 2. This shows that operating system 2 has an inherent cost which may explain why it is lazy by default. System 2 can also suffer from ego depletion when it is over worked. It basically gets to the point where system 2 gives up handling complicated problems and hands the reigns over to system 1.

The book has helped me gain a deeper understanding of how the human mind works. It will hopefully allow me to recognize when I am not engaging system 2 for a problem that I really should !